The 1920s was a dynamic, voltaic, energizing and boisterous period of our nation’s history — even more so for an African-American community that was reeling from the aftermath of slavery, emancipation, racist politics of the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacist regimes of Jim Crow segregation, the end of World War I, race riots, and mass migration into Harlem. Many black writers — and often queer black writers —gave voice to the angst of an era, influencing the artistic, cultural and political milieu of the time.

In his book, Claude McKay, Code Name Sasha: Queer Black Marxism and the Harlem Renaissance, FIRST scholar Gary Holcomb, guest professor at CU-Boulder English and professor in the Department of African American Studies at Ohio University, examines and discusses the life and writings of Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay, an openly gay, Marxist, Jamaican expatriate. McKay’s militant sonnet, “If We Must Die,” published in 1919 is considered a landmark in the Black Marxist movement, setting a defiant tone to the rumblings of the Black counterculture community. Through his poetry and writing, McKay described the reality of African-American life during the early twentieth-century period, yet his daring, fringe perspective put a target on his back.

“The work coming out of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance was spirited, compelling, vitalizing, profound, confrontational, and brave all at the same time,” says Holcomb, whose talk, “A Jolt of Consciousness: Writings of the Queer Black Renaissance,” will focus on how the Harlem Renaissance opened the door for a vital queer Black literary awakening.